Solomons still has plenty to offer

They say that the mark of a really good coach is the ability to mould a group of average players into a winning team, and Alan Solomons appears to have done that with dramatic effect over the past two months.

The former Stormers and Western Province coach, who served as Nick Mallett’s assistant throughout his record-equalling winning run with the Springboks in 1997/1998, returned to Cape Town at the end of June to help out the University of Cape Town survive what had become a dire battle to avoid relegation from the top league at Western Province.

At the time, UCT had lost virtually every game, and had just been hammered by Hamiltons.

Since Solomons took over, however, UCT have not lost again, and the most significant aspect of all is that they beat the teams that thumped them in the first round by the same scores that they lost by in the first.

UCT completed this amazing transformation with a big win over their old rivals, the Maties, on the campus this past weekend. Maties are the new national club champions, but UCT didn’t just beat them, they thumped the other big Western Cape university by such a big score that people were reaching for the record books afterwards.

UCT victories over the Maties have been a rare thing, so a 36-10 win, including four tries to one in a complete, total rugby display that some said would have made a provincial team proud, was quite an achievement for the “university on the hill”. Something quite startling must have happened there for a result such as this one to be possible.

That startling happening was the arrival of Solomons. After he took over, the students won eight out of eight, lifting themselves from the bottom of the log to third place. In the process they beat all the top teams in the league, and managed to accumulate 38 log points out of a possible 40.

“My home is now in England but when I was back here in May to visit family the Varsity president Dugald MacDonald approached me to help out the club, which as you know, I played for and then coached for more than 20 years,” says Solomons.

“Obviously UCT is an amateur club, but the basic principles of rugby are the same where-ever you play, so I introduced a semi-professional work ethic and at playing level worked very hard at getting the basics right and identifying the talent. There were some very good players who were languishing in the third team.”

The win over the Maties means that Solomons will be able to leave for England in two weeks time satisfied that he achieved what he set out to do at UCT. In this instance he definitely saved his alma mater from what could have been a horrible existence in the lower leagues.

However, while Solomons says he has several irons in the fire and is working on a couple of options, it is sad that he has to live outside of South Africa to further his rugby coaching career.

For various reasons Solomons has rubbed a lot of administrators up the wrong way, and is almost verging on persona non-grata, which may explain why the Natal Sharks passed him up when they advertised for the position of director of rugby at that union earlier in the year.

It is a position that is still not filled, but Solomons has the experience and the organisational skills to do a great job. He has shown several times during his career, and again at UCT, that he is an outstanding identifier of talent.

And while his last professional job at Northampton ended in disaster with seven straight defeats, perhaps it should be remembered that there was a reason why Solomons was lured to Northampton from Ulster in the first place.

He obviously impressed a few people, which is not surprising if you consider that in his three years in Belfast his team only lost thrice at Ravenhill and also won the Celtic Cup while punching above their weight in Europe.

Corne Krige, the former Springbok captain who led Northampton when Solomons was in charge, had a simple explanation for why Solomons failed: He just tried to change things too quickly, which led to enmity from senior players who had been long-serving stalwarts at the club.

Perhaps this is the one big drawback of Solomons. As a former lawyer, he is not afraid of conflict, and has long held that conflict management is the key to being successful. This is why he fell out with Harry Viljoen, who hated conflict, and he does rattle cages where-ever he goes.

But he also gets things done, and after a couple of years overseas he certainly possesses loads of the experience that is such a rare commodity or ingredient among South African coaches. If the Sharks don’t want him, it is high time Mallett pushed for him to fill a position where he can be useful to his former union in Cape Town.